Well, summer is officially here and the World Cup is well under way with both Canada and Japan heading into the knockout rounds. And of course, next week, both my nation and the United States will be celebrating their respective birthdays, so a holiday mood is most likely pervading all throughout the land.
On that vacation-minded note, let's have a listen to "Galaxy Special", the first track from fusion band Early Byrds and Kyoko Kimura's（木村恭子）1981 album "Up and Coming". It's a most upbeat and summery groovy instrumental punctuated by Kimura's vocal scatting. You can shake those cocktails on the Lido Deck while listening to this one.
There isn't a whole lot of information on Early Byrds aside from the lineup within the band. They are Hiroshi Nakanishi, Hiroyuki Fukue, Kunihiro Tsuji, Shingo Kanno, and Tsutomu Wajima (sorry, I couldn't find their kanji or what instruments they played). According to Discogs, they released two more albums in 1982 and 1986. As for Kimura, she has a J-Wiki profile which shows that she was active from the early 1970s in at least a few groups and that she was also getting into the Yamaha music contests a fair bit. Until her untimely passing at the age of 61 in 2013, she had also composed, narrated and recorded a vast number of commercial jingles to the extent that she had been called the Beethoven of Naniwa, to reference her home region in the Kansai area of Japan.
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